Payment for 89-year-old's act of kindness: 2 days in car trunk

Saturday

Apr 6, 2013 at 9:00 AMApr 6, 2013 at 10:06 AM

By Dan Barry THE NEW YORK TIMES

A steel-haired woman, 89 years old and an inch short of five feet, sat on a pillow in the driver's seat of her Buick LeSabre, just thinking. Parked outside a convenience store on one of the last days of winter, she was considering a pre-Easter treat for herself: an ice cream cone. Butter pecan.

Two girls, 15 and 14, appeared at the window, calling her “Miss” and offering to pay for a ride to the other side of town. Her inclination was to say no, but her strong belief in offering kindness to strangers won out. She said yes, of course, and no need to pay her.

Uncertainty soon joined the ride, as her passengers directed her to one house, then to another, and another. Then, according to the police, they snatched her keys, causing a tussle between two girls and a small woman three times their combined ages.

Youth won out. They locked her in the trunk.

The Buick roared away with its frail owner curled up in the hold's casketlike darkness. She was tossed about like forgotten luggage with every bump and turn. She could feel the vibrations pounding from the car radio that drowned out her calls for help. As a woman went missing, so did time, with day turning to night, night to day, day to night ...

It remains unknown what these girls were thinking, if they were thinking, when they imprisoned another human being in a car trunk without food, water or medication. What is known is just who they had dismissed, apparently, as just another defenseless little old lady: Margaret E. Smith, the backbone of a dot in the center of Delaware, in the town of Lincoln, called Slaughter Neck.

Her father, Dalton Carroll, worked as an ice man, farmer and factory worker; her mother, Grace, was a domestic until the many children came, though some did not survive infancy. She inscribed their 12 names in a thumbed-through Bible held together now with gray duct tape.

There was Leon, then Dalton, then Clarence, then Thomas and then, on March 15, 1924: Margaret.

They grew up in Slaughter Neck, an African-American community so small and tight that all the world was right there on Slaughter Neck Road: their house, their farmland, their elementary school — even their white clapboard Methodist church, where the Carroll children cut boredom by singing in the choir, founded by their father. Margaret sang soprano.

After a couple of years of high school, she enrolled in the Apex College of Beauty Culture and Hairdressing, in Philadelphia. For her graduation in 1946, she wore white earrings to match the white gown and mortarboard. Then she returned to Delaware to open a beauty shop in a cottage, no larger than a tool shed, on Slaughter Neck Road.

The first marriage, to a rake named Gus, “didn't stick,” as she'd politely say. The second was to Edward, who died young. The third was to George Smith, an Air Force veteran, an electrician and a good, good man. This marriage stuck — for 42 years, until his death in 2010.

“The black Liz Taylor,” Ms. Smith often called herself, “only with no money.” Family members preferred descriptions like kind, and witty, and, most of all, feisty. If you gave her lip, she liked to say, “I will answer you back.”

After a while she moved her beauty shop to a back room in the house she shared with George — on Slaughter Neck Road, of course — attracting clients from as far as Seaford, 30 miles away. Since her retirement more than a decade ago, she kept busy by taking her famous chicken-and-dumpling dinners to the homebound, volunteering at her church down the road and belonging to a local chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star.

Mostly, though, Ms. Smith stayed home, a one-story house bracketed by crop fields. Portraits of Jesus, Martin Luther King, and her many nieces and nephews kept her company, as did the flat-screen television propped on an old Zenith console the size of a washing machine, and that cat abandoned by a neighbor's death. She called it Cat, and kept it overfed.

This is the Margaret Smith who, on March 18, a Monday, decided to go shopping. Siblings were coming in for Easter, and she wanted to have presents. But first, she thought, maybe an ice cream cone at that convenience store in downtown Milford. Then those two young strangers asked for a favor.

"So I said yes,” she recalled. “And we started on.”

Minutes later, Ms. Smith was in the trunk, without her heart and blood-pressure medication, without her cellphone. “The doors slammed and then it took off — eeeeeekkk!” she said, imitating a car's getaway screech. “Oh Lord.”

Trapped in space normally occupied by those large cans of green beans she often donates to her church, Ms. Smith tried to stay strong. Whenever thoughts turned to her family or her long life, she said, “I had to push it back. I had to think about getting out of there.”

She nodded off now and then, but whenever conscious, she prayed. “Lord, am I going to make it?” she asked. “Lord, take care of me.”

At one point the girls opened the trunk somewhere around West Rehoboth, Ms. Smith later guessed. They forced her to hand over the $500 in her pocket, the police say, then locked her in the trunk once more.

Through the afternoon and into the night, Ms. Smith's relatives were calling her cellphone and home phone, but no answer. Then they called the hospitals and the police, but no luck.

One of Ms. Smith's many nieces, Sabrina Carroll, a special education teacher in Chester, Pa., said that family members joined the hunt Tuesday afternoon. But after hours of searching the Milford area for a golden 2001 Buick LeSabre and its 4-foot-11 driver, she saw no choice but to file a missing-person report with the police.

Ms. Carroll and her three sisters spent the night at their Aunt Margaret's all-too-quiet house, while, according to the police, the two teenage girls collected a couple of friends and checked into a Days Inn. Ms. Smith remained locked in the trunk, with only a light jacket to ward against temperatures in the low 40s.

On that Wednesday morning, the police say, the youths dumped a shoeless Ms. Smith in a remote cemetery somewhere outside of Seaford, where a dirt path provides the only access from the main road. It is a cemetery for the poor, all sand and weeds, with many graves marked by pressed metal instead of stone.

“I started crawling,” Ms. Smith recalled. “I'd stop for a few minutes, then start crawling again.”

She had no idea where she was. The rough ground tore at her hands and bloodied her knees. Still, she said, “I was just glad to have breath.”

Someone saw the woman crawling through the cemetery. Soon she was telling her story to a state trooper. Soon she was at a local hospital, eating chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans. Soon came word that the two girls and their companions had been arrested and charged with carjacking and kidnapping.

Ms. Smith went home to her family Bible, her many photographs, that overfed cat. And the other day, with hands still bruised and knees still raw, she made her way to Easter services at her church on Slaughter Neck Road, where the congregation rose in sustained applause.

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